Lois McMaster Bujold (b. 1949)

Quotes

• Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.

• If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door.

• You try to give away what you want yourself.

• It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.

• How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

• I am who I choose to be. I always have been what I chose…though not always what I pleased.

• His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

• Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.

• If you can't do what you want, do what you can.

• It's important that someone celebrate our existence... People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.

• I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is…the higher achievement.

• If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.

• If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us?

• The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.

• What you are is a question only you can answer.

• There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.

• I take it as a man's duty to restrain himself.

• A good friend of my son's is a son to me.

• Some men just aren't cut out for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.

• The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.